Accepting Our Part in the Gulf Oil Spill Disaster

I see the mats of oil floating in on every tide and I am back at Scan Bay scooping, scraping and handing bags of oil down the conga line of oil spill technicians. I am back on the fishing boat that was my home for three months trying to fall asleep while the muscle in my shoulders, back and arms scream with pain. I am back on the beach alongside my twelve companions scraping oil off of rocks trying to convince myself that what we are doing has made even the slightest bit of difference.  

The curtain has fallen down and the wizard is exposed. Drilling for oil isn’t clean, isn’t safe, isn’t protected by the most modern technology available to mankind, and here’s why (and my fellow Norwegians should appreciate this)? We been doin’ it this way for years. It works. Why change?

Even if oil developers wanted to change, there just isn’t much to change. The process for extracting oil is fairly simple. Find oil. Drill for oil. Try not to mess up the hole you dug to get it, and get a tap on it as fast as possible. Just because we have to drill down in earth a mile below the surface of the ocean doesn’t really change anything. You add a few pieces of technology, but how do you test it? You just don’t know what it can do until you do it. its like the NASA program and Apollo 13. Here you go boys. Take this duct tape, the plastic sheet off of an instruction manual, some tubing and get ‘er done. We love the romance of it, but that philosophy sucks when 5,000 barrels of oil a day are spewing up from the briny deep.

Cleaning up oil that has already spilled doesn’t really work. Its mostly guess work. You remove as much oil product as you can, hoping to preserve as much vegetation as possible, and pray that what remains of both can live harmoniously. The only real cure is prevention, and the reality of oil field operations is that you can only do so much to keep the genie in the bottle, and the more you push the envelope, the more likely the possibility that the genie is gonna bust loose. Oil is a genie. We know it can bite us, but we can’t turn our backs on the potential bounty to be had in those three wishes.

I am sad, so sad, and getting sadder every day that I see an animal struggling against overwhelming toxicity as they try to raise their young, groom themselves, and live on God’s green earth.  They have no thought to leave the nesting ground upon which they were born.  They dive for food in waters that have sustained them for centuries.  They die a slow, torturous death as the toxins shut down their livers, clog their pores, and they freeze to death.

Oil is ugly. There isn’t one point along its path from release underground to final distillation and packaging that isn’t risky. I am not just referring to the gasoline, the most volatile of the distillates. I am talking about EVERYTHING from the Bunker C that Asia burns in its factory engines that cruds up the atmosphere to the fertilizer and bug killer that keeps the food on the table then works its way into the waterways and ecosystems.

I am saddened because so many people don’t seem to understand our part, that of the consumer, in all of this, and how deeply dependent upon oil we have become. In the seventies, when the gas shortage hit us hard, we found it difficult to discuss manufacturing gas efficient vehicles, or turning down the thermostat. Our thirst for oil has far surpassed the gas in our tanks or the heating oil used to fuel our homes. It’s the cell phones that need constant upgrading, the iphones, ipods, and laptops. Its the synthetic fiber in our clothes, the fertilizer for our crops, the insulation on our electrical wires, the extruded plastic for the forks and spoons slipped inside our to go bags. its even the plastic visqueen that everyone wants to utilize to stop the flow of oil onto the beaches and into the marshes..

We crave this stuff. We consume it. We need to understand what our role in all of this mess has been, and figure out how to differentiate between what products made from oil we treasure and must conserve, and what is flotsam and must be eliminated from our ravenous appetite for crude, raw, sweet, heavy or otherwise. If we cannot face this truth. If we cannot weep for what we have helped to set in motion, then we cannot begin the process of accepting our part and finding ways to deal with our craving for oil in a realistic manner. Nigerians have been washing their clothes in water contaminated with oil toxins for years. Whole families of Malaysians were “removed” from their palm plantations to make room for a refinery long before Trans Ocean laid out the blue prints for the Deep Water Horizon rig. A family in Anacortes, Washington buried a loved after a refinery blew up just a short time before the methane soaked mud rushed a mile up the riser and exploded on the rig floor incinerating eleven men.

I do not wish to be harsh. I am staggering under the strain of coping with my own responsibility, but I am convinced that we must be brutally honest with ourselves if we are to find a solution. We can castigate BP, and drive them into bankruptcy, or we “hold them closer” in the Italian way. We can write letters to the company shareholders and tell them that we want them to maintain those shares, and be willing to support the company through the rough times. We ask them to be willing themselves to pay for this mess. They loved the profits. The damages… Not so much.

For ourselves, we can learn as much as we can about oil: how it is processed, into what is it processed, and how much of that do we really need? We need to find ways to discuss it with friends and family, classmate, workmates and anyone else who may be trying to understand what has happened. We need to do this with respect and understand that this is a very overwhelming problem, and that it will take patience and diligence to overcome. And when we find a way to cut back, we need to support one another on the follow through.

Finally, our country developed around the automobile and the industrial age. We formed our dependence on oil not in one generation, but over many several generations. Our culture has formed around easy access to crude oil. Therefore it stands to reason, that a shift away from the habitual and unthinking use of crude in all that we do will require a cultural shift in our thinking and in our way of life in America. I believe it can be done. It might even feel to some as if it were the end of the world. It won’t be, but the change such a shift might produce could very well herald the beginning of a wonderful age of reason.